Now leaving the station
by thesilversun
Summary: How Jack got off the Game Station after Parting of the ways.


As the sound of the TARDIS fades, Jack drops to his knees.

He aches all over, he can feel his chest burning and his eyes stinging and he knows it's not just from exertion. He's just run, staggered through seemingly endless corridors, tripping and falling down steps and stairways in his haste.

All for nothing, echoes through his mind, it was all for nothing. He's been left behind, abandoned, like he was nothing.

He had died for that flaming alien. That flaming amazing alien and his beautiful golden girl who'd started to make his life mean something again.

Dying for them, he'd been willing to do that, if it meant saving them. That part had turned out to be surprisingly easy, given the circumstances.

But living again? Knowing that he had apparently outlived his usefulness to them, that was hard. Somehow he'd expected better of them than that.

The only thing that Jack's certain of right now is that he's alone and that he had been dead. Because that first breath, that first gasp of life, the memory of reviving on a cold metal floor is burned indelibly into his brain. He doesn't know how he's alive again, or why, or what it means. All he does know is that it scares the hell out him.

That first day is spent waiting, desperately hoping that the Doctor will return for him, even if it is only so he can yell at him. Yell at him, kiss him and ask him what's going on and where had he gone to in such as hurry that he couldn't be bothered to find out if he was dead or alive.

The second is spent trying to send a signal to somebody, anybody to come and find him.

Jack can't remember a time when he's spent so long without hearing another voice, human or alien. Forty-eight hours of near silence, of knowing there is not another living soul to speak to within a million miles of him, and it's terrifying.

Jack has always surrounded himself with people. He needs them in ways that he can't even begin to put into words, but if he really had to answer, it would be that he has an abiding fear of being totally alone and always has for as long as he can remember.

By the third day Jack decides that if he's going to get out of this place and find the Doctor, and the answers he must surely have, he's going to have to do it himself.

So much of the technology aboard the Game Station is broken, smashed beyond repair, it takes Jack another two days to salvage enough to build what he needs.

Two days in which he dies again, falling while trying to reach a piece of circuit board, leaning out over a blown out floor. He spends the rest of that day trying to stop shaking, cursing at everything that's brought him to this.

Even after the machine is finished Jack waits three more days. Three days of walking empty corridors with nothing but ghosts and his own fears for company. Three days of sending signals that nobody responds to, of trying to understand what has happened to him.

All he knows is he can't give up on the Doctor yet, not yet. He'll give him a few more hours, another day. The Doctor will come back if only he waits for him. He'd promised he would, Jack's sure that he did.

It is a week, or as near as Jack can tell, from the moment the TARDIS faded from sight, when the air supply starts to fail.

Jack knows he can't wait any longer now, the Doctor has had his chance, and activates his patched together time vortex manipulator.

It's a terrible, terrifying thing to flick the switch, to open an uncontrolled vortex, to watch as time and space distort themselves within what appears to be little more than a giant soap bubble.

There's no way of controlling it, not properly, no way to set a definite time or date, even if he had any idea of which one to use. The best he can do is to use his old Time Agency wrist computer to point it in the right direction and hope to hell it works.

This, Jack knows, will probably burn it out, maybe even permanently. Leaving him stranded wherever it takes him. But he's all out of ideas and out of time now as well.

Early 21st Century Earth seems to be his best chance of finding the Doctor again, Rose was from then and the Doctor always seemed to be visiting back there for one reason or another.

Closing his eyes he steps into the shimmering light.

He wakes on a bleak rocky hillside over looking a port filled with tall masted ships, canvas sails billowing in the stiff breeze.

He could cry for joy at the sight and sound of bustling, living, vibrant humanity below. Instead he weeps for the fact that his life, his existence as he knew it, is gone.


End file.
